Asus HD 5970 Ares

Asus HD 5970 Ares is one of the largest graphics cards we have ever seen as well as one of the most powerful we’ve come across. This monster is capable of outperforming any card available today.

The card is based on the Cypress GPU but rather than running at reference 725MHz GPU clock, it runs at astonishing 850MHz. This is the same clock we have on the single GPU HD 5870, but in order to address this dual GPU card’s thermals, reference cooling was not enough. Asus came out with a three slot wide solution, which works well and we can tell you that the heat coming from the card was acceptable for our makeshift thermal sensors (we actually just put our hand there).

The memory runs at 1200MHz (4800MHz effectively). On the I/O panel we found one dual-link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connector. We must admit, however, that the three power connectors are pretty scary. As you can see from the picture, the card has two 8-pin and one 6-pin controllers, which says enough of the card’s power craving as well as what this beast is capable of.

The card is equipped with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. On the back we have big heatsink.